Friday, February 17, 2006

BBC needs thousands of people to help them in their climate change experiment. Using a technique known as distributed computing, they are hoping to harness the power of thousands of PCs around the world to predict climate change. From BBC Climate Change:

Taking part is easy. All we’re asking you to do is download a simple programme, which doubles as a screensaver. Once you’ve installed it, your computer will take care of the rest. You don’t have to send us anything. You don’t have to enter any data. In fact – if you decide not set the programme as your screensaver, you probably won’t even notice it’s there.

However, if you want to, you can follow the progress of your experiment on a 3D spinning globe.

The experiment works by making use of your spare processing power. All you have to do is use your computer exactly as you normally would, and the programme will run calculations in the background. When it’s done, it will send results back to scientists in Oxford, who will combine everyone’s results. The more people who take part, the more complete their predictions about the future climate will be.

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Creator of hit show Singapore Haunted. Spurs fan, experienced astronomer and occasional ITK. I.Z. Reloaded covers news, pop culture, blogs, websites, gadgets, the fascinating and the weird from a Singapore perspective. The blog is a runner up in both the 2006 Weblog Awards (Best Asia Blog) and the 2004 Asia Blog Awards (Best Singapore Blog). Contact him at izreloaded[at]gmail[dot]com.